Ken Kelly: Now Hear This

Last year at Howard House, from my review:

Ken Kelly has worked his way out of a decade-long slump to bounce back at the top of his game. For years his paintings labored under the effort of their making. By the time they were done, they had gone dry.
His new work is monochrome oil and enamel on a grid. Make that a subverted grid. Kelly offers Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie married to African mud cloth and lace dollies. It shouldn’t work but it does. As form snaps into place, you can almost hear the click.
These paintings are both maps and places. In their densities there is also air. Their patterns allude to landscapes, and shapes are suggestions hovering on the edge of fact. Kelly is once again the painter he promised to be, capable of merging force with grace.

Plot from the 2008 exhibit:

Second verse is not same as the first. The paintings in the current exhibit look like but aren’t stretched letters. He moved on from Mondrian to offer constructivist typography  in a fun-house mirror.

Go-Go

Kelly does not tape off. He pencils his shapes freehand onto canvas, which gives them, when seen in person, a tender intimacy that pushes against the loudmouth elan of their abstracted graphics.

Black and Tan

Through Nov. 28.Saturday, 1 p.m., Kelly talks about his work at the gallery.